


Boston Marriage

by yekaterina



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Angst, Anti-Reagan, Cold War, F/F, Melodrama, Mutual Pining, Soviet Spy Katya, Um.... Depressing, Women be having existential crises, You Construct Intricate Rituals Which Allow You to Touch the Skin of Other Women, the 1980s, the Inherent Trauma of Womanhood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-01-16 06:24:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18515740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yekaterina/pseuds/yekaterina
Summary: This isn’t the Katherine she’s loved for two decades, the woman who sells electronics and does charity work for the Children’s Hospital, who loves the absurdity of French New Wave films, who has long blonde hair with stubborn brown roots, who has to wear chunky black glasses because she hates contacts, who sounds like a Kennedy family reject, who…Is probably none of these things.(Boston, 1981. After twenty years of friendship, Trixie learns her best friend Katherine isKatya, a Soviet spy.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [campholmes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/campholmes/gifts).



> so this is a remix of the second-ever fic i started writing: cold war era russian spy katya, inspired by the americans on fx. i started writing what would become this story in august of 2017 and here it is now! the tv show has since ended and i've published 14 other stories, but oh well.
> 
> the title is an old school lesbian term.
> 
> warnings for this fic: heavy emotional stuff, some invasions of privacy, cold war craziness, etc. each chapter will have warnings dependent on what happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy b-day katya!

Trixie doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t say anything.

They keep asking her if she Understands. The woman in a blue suit asks this in a more gentle if not more patronizing tone than the man in grey does, but it’s all the same to her. No. No, she doesn’t understand.

This is surreal. This  _isn’t_  real. She’s not in the ceramic art studio she inherited from her aunt on Congress Street in Boston, Massachusetts. She’s in an alternate reality. She’s in hell, which is the same as Boston, but hotter. And Reagan isn’t president, but a dictator.

“Your friend isn't who she says she is,” the woman repeats.

Trixie’s eyes shift from a blank wall in her office back towards the detectives. They've tainted the room. Nothing feels familiar; not the trinkets on display, not the file cabinets covered in magnets from all across the world, nor the art books lining the shelves. It's all ruined. She'll have to repaint the walls.

“Katherine Carla McCook is the alias of a woman named Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova," she continues, drilling the information into Trixie's aching skull. "She's a Soviet sleeper agent. KGB. She went off the radar last night, after the leak. As far as we know, she is still in the country, but we don’t know where.”

The man sits forward and pats the spot next to Trixie's hand on her desk. “If she tries to contact you or gives you any information, turn it over to us. We will protect you.”

Protect her from what? Katherine — Yekaterina — Whoever, is the best friend that she has ever had. Two solid decades of ironclad friendship.

Katherine never hurt her, ever. Never raised her voice, never hit her, never subjected her to the petty cruelties that fueled the other, lesser friendships that have plagued Trixie’s life. The woman treated her like her most precious doll.

Trixie can’t imagine her best friend doing her any harm, except for this… whatever this is.

But it does explain the strangeness that surrounded her.

And why she couldn’t make a date almost half of the time, even with months-ahead notice. Trixie had simply deemed her flaky and forgiven her long ago. Her favorite foods, movies, songs, and places were on a rotation rotating faster than Trixie could keep up with. She would swear it was This and not That that Katherine loved more than anything.

Somehow, Trixie knew to never speak about it.

These were the little quirks that formed the woman Trixie held dearest. What are they now? Components of a person that doesn't actually exist? What does she do with twenty years of knowing a person who is up and gone in the night, never to be seen or heard from again?

Is she just supposed to go on with her life? Is that all there is?

The darker parts of the range of human emotion are all swirling inside of her and they want to come out. She wants to say these people are lying to her, playing a cruel joke on her, because Katherine would never… she knows the woman better than anyone.

Or maybe Trixie’s an idiot, but regardless:

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Trixie lies. Fuck cops.

 

Five months later, she stays in the studio every night long past the hour she used to go home, which was already later than sane.

Trixie is alone within the creamy walls and robin egg tile floors. Warm artificial lights illuminate the pots, dishes, and sculptures on display. The glazed pieces and the Eurythmics on tape keep her company. Nobody else comes in except to buy something.

She had to put her adult group pottery classes on hold. It's too much to bear. It was how they met.

Katherine was not her most gifted student, but her most interesting. She took great joy in sculpting disfigured religious characters. She molded, detailed, and painted their bleeding wounds and uneven limbs with the quiet care of a bonsai artist tending to their leafy masterpieces.

She'd coo to them under her breath throughout her process. Trixie found it fascinating.

Her work horrified the other students. Despite her irresistible born-and-bred Bostonian charm, the pottery wheel next to her remained empty during the second class she came to, so Trixie took to sitting beside her.

She never sat anywhere else but next to the bespectacled Catholic from that day on.

"I want you to have this one," Katherine said to her after a class one evening, shortly after they had started getting together for coffee and movie theater trips. She was offering up her latest finished product: a miniature figurine in the throes of a mystic vision. "I think it's my best one."

"I love it," Trixie said, smiling. She accepted it from Katherine's paint-covered hands. It would be the first of many of her creations that would populate her apartment. "Thank you." 

She’s heard nothing from Katherine. Radio silence. The detectives didn’t believe her. And then the FBI introduced themselves. She knows they were following her. Watching her. She wanted to scream herself hoarse on the streets with everybody watching. They’ve only recently left her alone.

Trixie was a prolific artist before this bullshit. These days she can’t do any work other than running her fingers over big lumps of wet clay spinning in a neverending circle on what used to be her favorite pottery wheel. What once soothed her existential boredom is now her own personal Ancient Greecian hell.

It is not the most glamorous punishment. We can’t all be Sisyphus pushing up the boulder.

She does this for hours. Every sculpture turns out ugly and stupid. Sometimes they fall apart on the wheel or after she takes them out of the kiln because of their lack of support and stability. It’s more more than an apt summary of how she’s been doing.

Picasso had his Blue Period. Trixie has what she is privately calling her Red Scare Period.

The local art community, not in on it, is referring to it as her “Dada” moment. Her work has long been popular with desperate to be unique twenty-somethings since things got weird in the late sixties, but her newer pieces are attracting the weirder denizens of the city who aren’t weird enough to alienate their rich parents. At least her suffering does not delve into the economic domain.

It does, however, delve into everything else. She’s just forty-three, but her hair, once blonde as a baby's, turns greyer every day. Her digestive system is in shambles. Her skin is drying out. She swears she’s developing arthritis, diabetes, migraines, and heart murmurs all at once. 

She’s diagnosed with “complicated grief” and "major depression" instead. She does not take the pills she is prescribed.

Whatever sixth sense moms have for this kind of thing, hers possesses it as well. The woman is too much of a farmer hippie to know what's going on in the news and Trixie sure as hell hasn't told her about Katherine. Whatever the reason, she calls more than she used to.

"Beatrice, depression runs in our family. Your grandma had it," her mom says this and ten variations of it every time they talk. Trixie says ten variations of "I know" until her mom stops talking about it and promises to visit her or buy her a plane ticket home. She does not fulfill these promises. It is both a relief and another dagger into the heart.

She ignores everyone else's calls. She doesn't want their condolences, their offers to take her out somewhere nice, or even worse, their good riddances. She's heartbroken, but she doesn't hate Katherine. She couldn't. Ever. Trixie yearns to see her again. She thinks she does see her, sometimes, out on the street or at her bedroom window, but it each time it turns out to be nothing, no one. Her ghost is haunting her.

Trixie knows her best friend isn’t dead, but this is grieving, as the therapist she saw twice said. She supposes the persona of “Katherine” is dead. But Yekaterina lives on. Whoever that is. Who knows how far the role extended.

God, she misses her. That is the old plain truth. She wants her back. No matter if she's nothing like the person she knew.

She could love Yekaterina as much as she did Katherine. Still loves. Always will.

A bell rings, signaling someone’s come in the door. She turns her head from her work and sees a woman idling by the counter.

The woman holds a takeout bag from Boston Market. Trixie’s stomach swings at the sight, but the woman is a seventy-something redhead covered in freckles. She's wearing a blue and green plaid pussy tie blouse and matching capri pants that Katherine wouldn't ever dare wear. Professional clothing. Katherine was loathe to go near it.

She was a comfy t-shirt, bold-print zip-up hoodie (every single day in the fall), blue jeans, bright colorful socks and black sneakers (or rubber flip flops — socks still paired with) kind of woman. Casual. Her clothing never matched and sometimes didn't fit; some shirts she wore dwarfed her tiny frame. Trixie would ache.

Trixie puts on her best The Customer’s Always Right voice. “Sorry, we’re closed.”

“Hiya stranger,” the woman says. Trixie tries to place when and where she's met this oddly familiar old woman when she opens her mouth again:

"Sweetie. It's me."

And suddenly, Trixie is five and ninety-five all at once, heart threatening to burst with the joy of a child at play, as well as with the pain of a woman on her deathbed. Her eyes race around the studio. All the window shutters are closed. Good. Didn’t she lock the door?

Annie Lennox is singing about rain, but the stereo may as well be pumping out white noise. All she can hear is the blood thundering in her ears and the phantom scream in her own throat. 

She stands up and is immediately dizzy, head swimming and vision going spotty until it settles down, but not by much. Her knee knocks the wet clay pot off its spinning platform. It splatters onto the floor, taking the form of a miserable pile of gunk.

The woman rushes halfway to her and meets her in the middle. Trixie doesn't remember racing forward, but somehow she manages to take a lean but muscular arm in hand and she pulls and pulls until they're in her office.

She's being smiled at. Her throat runs dry and she has to think her way back into functioning. She locks the office door. The woman appears unfazed, but she's absolutely silent. Trixie takes a cautious, shaky step towards her.

“Katherine,” Trixie whisper-screams. “You can’t be here.”

“I can’t? Says who?” she's speaking at full volume and hoists the takeout bag up high. “I always bring you cheesecake when you’re here late.”

Trixie can do nothing but stare at her. She looks so much older, but not at all how Katherine would age. She even smells different. Like peppermint candy, not floral perfume.

This isn’t the Katherine she’s loved for two decades, the woman who sells electronics and does charity work for Boston Children’s Hospital, who loves the absurdity of French New Wave films, who has long blonde hair with stubborn brown roots, who has to wear chunky black glasses because she hates contacts, who sounds like a Kennedy family reject, who…

Is probably none of these things.

“Like my makeup?” she asks, touching her cheeks. Her nails are bare. “Aren’t my freckles cute? I make a handsome older woman. And a pretty redhead, I think.”

Trixie doesn’t reply. Katherine’s good humor falters. The air in her tiny office grows stuffier by the second. Trixie is suffocating.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asks. The makeup exaggerates the way her face gets when she’s concerned. “Trixie.”

"You haven't brought me Boston Market in months."

She couldn't give a damn about the food, but it's all she can force out of her mouth. It's the closest thing she can get to saying:  _I haven't seen you in months. Where have you been? Are you sleeping well? Eating enough?_

"I'm sorry," Katherine tells her.

There are levels to the apology, stacked up high. Trixie can hear every single one. It's a start. Breathing becomes a little easier.

“I told them I didn't know,” Trixie says, voice thin.

“That’s,” she sighs. “That’s not what I’m here for.”

“Your name is Yekaterina."

It comes out hushed and hurting, the way secrets do when you weren't supposed to be in on them. It sounds the same as it did when she told her sister that she knows she's pregnant; when she told her mom that she knows she's going to leave dad; when she told her last girlfriend she knows that she's been unfaithful. She used to think of herself as a person who catches on quick, but now—

"Katya," she says. "It's Katya."

 _Katya._ This is real. This is Her. The name "Katya" slashes through "Katherine" in Trixie's mind and lodges itself in snugly. She holds onto it, whatever it is.

Katya’s face tightens like she’s going to burst into tears, but nothing happens for a painful five seconds. At the end of it, she plops down into Trixie’s chair and takes the cheesecake out of its bag. Trixie manages to stay on her feet by leaning heavily against her desk.

She wants to say: _I didn't believe them for the longest time. I yelled in their faces. I defended you. I tore up the pictures and the transcripts they showed me. I cried every night. I want to cry right now. I want to tear this ridiculous disguise off of you and see if I recognize who you are underneath. I want to turn you in, then break you out. I want this to be over, I want this to never have begun._

And finally, because this nagging thought penetrates every mental tangent she's ever had about Katya: _I want you_. As simple as that. As complicated as that.

“They told me everything," is what she says instead. Katya mutters under her breath as she pops open the clear plastic box.

"Hm. No," Katya shakes her head. She takes a big bite of the cheesecake and chews open-mouthed, stress-eating, same as she did when they watched horror movies in the dark. "They don't know everything."

“No?” Trixie says. Katya is swiveling back and forth in the chair. “Enlighten me, then.”

Katya waves her fork around in the air. “Where do you want me to begin?”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Speaking like an American. You’re not from Marlborough. You’re from Moscow.”

“I’m from Odessa.”

She replies in a voice that Trixie’s never heard from her before. Her stomach plummets at the reality of it, but at least the smoker’s husk isn’t another lie. It’s actually more pronounced with the thick, very-not-Boston accent.

Trixie has so many questions. “What are you here for?” is what she starts with, because, she does have this one worry: “To kill me?”

“No!” Katya cries out. The chair-swiveling stops and the fork falls into the box. “God, no. Jesus.”

“You wouldn’t tell me if you were, would you?”

“I’m not that kind of,” Katya pauses. Trixie ventures that she is searching for a word that isn’t agent, operative, or specialist in an effort to keep this as vague as possible. Vagueness is good. Nothing to kill someone over. “Person.”

Trixie sits down on the edge of her desk. Katya's hand reaches out to hold her knee, but the hand stops midway and returns to her lap.

"You're not that kind of person," Trixie repeats. "What kind of person are you?"

Katya busies herself by packing up the cheesecake. “I'm a computer person. You know that."

"What does a computer," Trixie stops herself short when Katya's face takes on an expression that tells her she can't go much further down this road. So she takes a U-turn. “Were you recruiting me when you brought me along to those socialist meetings?”

Katya shakes her head. “Your socialist leanings were already there. But no, I was never recruiting you. I just wanted a friend with me,” she says. Her eyes meet the floor. “My best friend.”

It doesn’t sound like an afterthought, but an admission. They’ve thrown the phrase around countless times in all their years together. It sounds completely different now. Honest. It might be the first time Katya’s ever been truly honest with her, for all she knows.

“You mean that?” Trixie asks. Katya’s head snaps up and her eyes widen, all innocent and childlike. She stares hard into Trixie's face.

“More than anything,” Katya says. She gets up out of the chair and takes Trixie's hands in hers. “You’re the only person I ever wanted to tell. You’re the only person. I hated lying to you. I hated it, Trixie, I hated it. I wanted to share everything with you. Everything.”

Tears are forming at the corners of Katya's eyes and some of her makeup comes off in streaks, but the fake set-in wrinkles stay. Those are movie-quality. The wig is too. It’s Rita Hayworth. Wavy, soft, with different shades of gorgeous ripe reds. The girls at Jacques’ would kill for it.

Trixie imagines Katya turning herself into whatever person she needs to be in the bathroom of the cute little apartment by the bay she’s lived in for as long as they’ve known each other. It’s either still covered in police tape or barren, devoid of all life that Katya gave to it. She starts crying.

"Why are you here?" Trixie asks. Her words are wobbling and breaking. "I thought I'd never see you again. I thought... Oh, god,  _Katherine_."

She's pulled her into a hug and she wants to scream out, so she does, muffled into Katya's shoulder. Something horrifying suddenly dawns on her and she digs her fingers into her spine.

"What if they're listening to us?"

"They're not. I checked."

Trixie pulls away from her and studies her face. "When?"

"Today. The night I had to leave. I wanted to," she stops, swallows hard. Both of them are still crying, shedding silent tears. Katya's eyes are huge wet marbles. "You know. All this time. Five months without you is a lifetime."

Trixie slumps back down against her and Katya holds her tighter, rubs a soothing hand over the back of her head. Her fingers are warm and dry. She runs them through Trixie's hair and over the back of her neck, loosening her tense muscles with every second. Katya's going to unspool Trixie into nothing in her arms.

Katya's soft lips brush against Trixie's burning red ear. "I wouldn't put you in danger. And I'm smarter than them."

"But they found out about you," Trixie whines through her loudening sobs, like a child. She's never felt so helpless, not even when she had the right to be a helpless, confused, terrified little child. She's so hungry for everything to be good again. She sees herself starving to death.

"My country's fault, not mine. And the Americans have no idea what I've been getting up to these last months."

"Well," Trixie sniffs. She wipes her wet, snot streaked face with the back her hand. Katya lets her own face grow wet freely. "Don't tell me, please. The questions they asked me were crazy and I can't remember all the answers I gave."

"I'm so sorry. I had no idea they would go after you. I kept my private life so private."

Trixie wants to vomit. When she opens her mouth, it surprises her that she doesn't. "It was me. I called the number on the news. I told them I wouldn't go to their offices, but that they could come to my studio."

It is dizzying how fast the color drains out of Katya's face and how abrupt the flow of her tears comes to a stop. She doesn't let go of Trixie. She opens her mouth, then shuts it. She does this twice. On the third try:

"You what?" Katya asks, eyes wide. It's not harsh at all, but disbelieving.

"I thought they would tell me where you were. I thought I could go to you and warn you or tell you to run away and take me with you, or, or something, I, I don't know what I was thinking. I'm sorry."

"Oh," she exhales. "Oh."

Her head drops so she's staring at the floor. Her shoulders rise and fall slowly. Her grip on Trixie is firm.

"I'm so sorry," Trixie chokes out. "You could've come sooner, couldn't you? If they didn't know about us? You could've. If I didn't ask them about you. I just wanted to know if you were okay. You could've stayed with me and been safe, I'm so stupid, I—"

Katya's head snaps back up and she pulls Trixie in so close, their noses would've smashed together if Katya wasn't inches shorter.

"You've never been through this before. I'm not angry with you. You couldn't have known. You didn't know. I'm not angry."

"I'm not angry with you either," Trixie says. Katya lets go of her only to take her face in her hands. With every passing second, she holds her face tighter, keeping her trembling head somewhat steady. "I want to be. I want to be so bad. But I can't."

"I know," Katya says it so quietly Trixie doesn't register it until they're silent again.

"What are we going to do?" Trixie asks.

"I have to leave," she says. Trixie's first instinct is to latch onto her and never let go. She follows her second instinct, which is to fall apart.

"Please don't."

"I’m coming back," Katya says it with such force that Trixie gasps a little. "I promise. I’m never lying to you again. You understand? You're my one person. I'm coming back. I'll keep coming back for you. I swear."

This is goodbye. Why say it in proper words when it sounds the same?

Katya doesn’t need to ask, or beg, for her to promise not to tell a soul that she came here. So she doesn’t. Trixie says nothing more as she follows her out of her office and watches her walk down the street. She looks like any old woman as she disappears into the black, quiet, forgotten by the sparse passerby.

Trixie closes the studio for the night and drives home in complete silence. It takes hours to fall asleep after she collapses into bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! if you wanna chat, i'm iloveyouviolet on tumblr.
> 
> anachronisms: "here comes the rain" by the eurythmics didn't come out until 1983. boston market was established in 1984.
> 
> it's all fiction, please don't take it too seriously, there will be more anachronisms in the future!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’d eat well if she was cooking for Katya, making sure she was eating well too. God knows what Katya has been filling her little stomach with. As Trixie knew her, she was never the most healthy woman and was very pleased to buy and devour ice cream, salty treats, sodas, and cigarettes — most of the time, if not always, on the same day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter features a flashback scene in the middle. it's in past tense, and you'll know it begins and ends when you see the asterisk signs
> 
> heads up: discussion of eating issues, depression, and serving the Catholic church as a metaphor for serving the USSR

Time goes by in a painful crawl, but the heaviness lightens up. Minutely. But it does. Katya is alive,  _smarter than them_ , and is coming back.

Every other week that passes since Katya visited, the Sunday newspaper in her mailbox has had certain words circled in red on its pages. She refuses to believe Katya comes to her building without knocking on her door. There must be cronies working for her. Trixie changes her locks.

After ten weeks, the messages compose a short note:

IT'S NOT THE SAME WITHOUT YOU.

I AM SO SORRY.

I MISS MOVIES ON SUNDAYS AND POT/-TER/-Y SO MUCH.

PLEASE TAKE CARE!

I LOVE YOU, DEAR.

Every word makes her squeeze. She hides away the marked newspaper pages in a manila folder in her studio office and recycles the rest. Two weeks after she's read  _I love you, dear_  a hundred times, there are no more circled words. Four weeks trudge by. Nothing. She cancels her subscription to everything and throws out her junk mail without thought.

It should make her feel better. Going cold turkey. It doesn't. She returns to the manila folder constantly.

She stays fortified in her home or at her studio, then cabin fever takes hold all at once one night, and she starts the process of going back out into the world.

One of the few things Katya never did with her was go to Jacques' Cabaret, so Trixie begins finding herself at its bar most weekends.

Boston may be neo-puritanical and clogging up with New York's yuppie rejects, but Jacques' exists in a time warp where the weird, queer, and the combination thereof are welcome. It is one of the select gay clubs Trixie envisions will stand the test of time. She hadn't thought so about the more evocative ones she went to during an experimental phase she had in the seventies. Those have all since closed.

The world is closing in on everyone. It's the end of things. Reagan says, smiling, that it's the beginning.

It's not like the summers of her twenties when she'd say bye to her friends, pack her things and head up to Provincetown, stay there with the fellow artists and the queens until the leaves turned brown. She hasn't been to P-Town in years. As she grows older, she remembers more fondly the non-air-conditioned hotel rooms she'd dread sleeping in every night, stuffy from the wet heat and from the drunken, druggy sex.

Trixie is far from having her pussy eaten by an LSD-stamped tongue while she smokes marijuana, both in time and circumstance. Her body has rejected what attention it's been given after Katya went away, but it's been aching again.

 _Focus on the present_ , she tells herself.  _Forget the past. You can't go back to it. You can look at it, but you can't touch it._

So, she touches what she can: her lips to the rim of a cold glass of water Sharon the bartender sets down in front of her when she's been staring at the bar countertop for too long.

"Thank you," Trixie says. Sharon displays gruff concern until someone is asking for a rum and coke on the far side of the bar. Trixie turns on her stool to face away from the other barflies.

Jacques' is nice. Cool, dark, cavelike. Its guts are packed with small round tables and metal chairs, but with enough space to have a stage area in the shape of a T. The length of it juts out in a modestly fabulous runway. Clear Christmas lights are wrapped all around the meager base of it, matching the lights draped high above. The stage backdrop is a shimmering silver foil curtain that the queens make good, dramatic use of.

And the queens love their dykes here. The place fills up with a decent coverage of the lesbian spectrum, as well as with almost every kind of fag one could imagine.

At the tables and at the bar, there are gays in t-shirts and jeans, leather, suits and skirts, mesh, and neon spandex of every color and pattern known to humankind. The hairdos range from basic to gravity-defying and the jewelry from church girl to church deviant.

Every night is a casting call for a Madonna video. All of her videos, all at once. It's kind of amazing.

As for Trixie, it's late September and every day she wears fuzzy sweaters tucked into yoga pants. She tries and mostly fails to match her rotation of leg warmers with her sneakers. She hasn't bothered with makeup or trying to tame her hair; she pushes it back with soft headbands or hides it underneath bandanas. Contacts have become an excruciating pain, so she's taken her circular pink eyeglasses out of retirement.

Katya would've loved her newfound rejection of Western society's standards on womanly presentation.

It's another clue she didn't recognize before. The list is growing at a constant pace.

Trixie doesn't fit in at places like this, but she doesn't stand out either. She likes it that way. Her meager fame in the art world stays within the borders of white-walled galleries and art journal essays. She isn't a Haring nor a Holzer and doesn't often get to hang out with those types, so she navigates gay culture and art culture in separate streams.

No, she isn't Miss Gay Pride. She loves women and they love her, but she's boring. Married to her work. Or she was Before, which is truly a word cluttering her thoughts without remorse.

Regardless, she's been close friends with Jacques' head hostess, Shea, since before she started gigging and thus most of the regular lineup gives Trixie hugs and kisses as they collect her tips. On their best nights, they give her free shots, which she then passes on to the nearest person who needs a drink more than her.

Shea runs the shows with an ever-weakening iron grip. The girls worship her, who couldn't, she's very lovely, but it doesn't prevent nights where they all want to kill each other over stolen tips and dresses returned with rips. Tonight is one of those nights.

Trixie is here sober, alone, waiting for Shea to come running to her after her last number with bloodshot eyes, needing to be taken home and crash on Trixie's crushed velvet couch.

At present, Shea is giving it her all during her Diana Ross medley, grooving and cat-walking in a straight wig and a blood red cocktail dress. Trixie, having reentered reality, watches with a similar captivation she's had since day one, though with a level of detachment the other patrons here who are drunk don't possess. 

She suddenly feels a presence at her side and looks over. A young butch woman is sidling up next to her at the bar, eyeing her. She's handsome, cheery-looking, and has her black hair slicked back. She keeps a red bandana in her right back pocket. Trixie's had her eyes on the small triangle of color as she's walked around the club, chatting with other butches and tipping the queens.

"Hi," Trixie says.

"Hi. You're pretty," the butch says, grinning. Trixie blushes despite herself and the butch’s grin widens. Her teeth are crooked. “Can I buy you a drink?"

She reminds Trixie of a younger version of herself, an alternate universe where she kept her hair buzzed short and styled herself in denim and leather and participated in the hanky code. The butch leans in close, so Trixie can smell her cologne. It’s pleasant. Woodsy.

"I'm driving a friend home," Trixie explains, and the butch nods, understanding. She starts to back up out of her space. Trixie places a hand on her muscular arm, so she doesn't get the idea that she wouldn't want to be deep inside of this woman. “Keep me company?”

The butch clicks her studded tongue and sits down next to her.

"Who's your friend?" she asks as she's signaling Sharon. Trixie downs her water as she orders herself a Budweiser. "Maybe I know 'em? I'm here all the time," her voice drops and she leans in even closer. “I know you are too. I’ve seen you around.”

It’s so _knowing_ and something switches on in her brain. Could it be possible that—

“Like what you see, mama?”

Her voice is deep, husky, and Bostonian, piercing through Trixie’s heart. But it’s not Her. She wouldn’t do this. Not like this.

“Yeah,” Trixie whispers.

The butch raises a pierced brow. “What's wrong? What, do I remind you of someone?”

Trixie swears that she's misheard her, that this is too on the nose to be real, but _real_ means nothing anymore, so she clears her throat and pushes on.

“No. I need to go to the bathroom," Trixie says. The butch is staring at her lips. Trixie’s hand hasn’t left her arm. “Do you want to come?"  
   
The bathroom’s thick cement walls muffle the sounds of the club. Shonen Knife is pumping through the speakers and the crowd is revving up. Yuhua’s number has begun. Shea is going to be searching for her soon.

Trixie has the butch up against the wall, her small chest pressed into the cold bricks. She’s much shorter than Trixie, but her frame is similar, albeit with more muscle than fat on her bones. She runs her hands over her body as they make out, delighting in the twitches beneath the warm skin underneath her fingers.

Trixie pulls back from her wet mouth tasting of beer and Menthols.

“This is gonna have to be quick,” Trixie whispers, hot against the buzzed hairs on her sweaty neck.

The butch moans. “Fine by me.”

Trixie kisses her again and wraps her arms around her waist to unbuckle her belt. She pulls down her pants without needing to undo the button and zipper because they’re baggy on her. She slips her hand into her boxers and tugs on soaked curls and strokes over labia smaller than her own until whining fills her ears, and then she slots fingers in, pumping and turning inside of her until two becomes three, then four, at request.

She debates whether or not she should let herself daydream. She decides after the sounds coming out of the butch’s mouth and pussy resemble what her sexual fantasies have sounded like, that yes, she’s going to imagine this is Katya she is fucking.

The butch comes in roughly three minutes. She pushes Trixie against the sink and drops her knees to the tile floor to suck on Trixie’s swollen clit. She tips her head back against the mirror on the wall and closes her eyes, drifting off into the recesses of her mind until she’s coming inside the butch’s mouth with a yell.

“Dolly, did you just go through a breakup?” the butch asks, when she’s up on her feet again. Trixie sags against the mirror.

She starts to say no, then switches to: “Kind of. It's more complicated when you’re older,” because it isn’t entirely a lie.

The butch is quiet. Her face indicates she’s trying to think of something wise to say.

"Time heals all wounds," is what she comes up with. Trixie laughs, softly. The butch blushes at herself. “That’s what everyone says.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Trixie repeats, to make the butch smile again. “Thank you, handsome.”

“You too, pretty. Have a good night," she kisses the corner of Trixie’s mouth and fixes her hair with a comb before leaving her behind.

Trixie washes the come and sweat off of her hands and stares at herself in the mirror. She’s aged well, is what her grandmother would’ve said. Aged like she went through the worst and came out alive, with the wrinkles and scars to prove it. She's aged more in these past months than she has in years.

Her hair, still greying, turning silvery, somehow is holding onto its curly texture, though the grease flattens it out a little. She's refrained from chopping it all off but doesn't doubt she is one more exceptionally bad day away from doing it.

Her cheeks are going thin now, losing their cherub-baby chubbiness, as if she's going through puberty and not an early mid-life crisis. Her brown eyes haven’t shrunken, they’re still big and dark; new moons encased in the whites of her eyes, though the skin under her eyes carries a richer purple hue and her crow's feet have deepened.

She splashes cool water onto her face and hangs her head while taking deep breaths. She hones in on the sound of the droplets splattering into the sink to drown out the crowd outside the bathroom as well as the crowd inside her head.

Trixie looks back to the door. She's trying her damnedest to make all the noise behind it disappear just by staring at it when Shea suddenly pops her head in.

“Hey girl,” Shea says. Her tone is kind, despite the tiredness clear in her glitter-coated eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”

 

*

On a snowy night in the winter of 1972, Katherine returned to Boston from one of her overseas missionary trips that would keep her away for a week or two at a time. Trixie always missed her terribly and welcomed her back to her apartment for the night with a warm hug and good food.

Katherine was always returned tired. Sometimes she’d return rather shaken. Trixie would be there to pick up the pieces, though she could never solve the puzzle. That cold, white night was one of those times.

They sat together on Trixie’s bed after a dinner of pasta and white wine. Katherine was crying. Trixie was rubbing Katherine's back, ignoring the burning suffering of her own heart, and thinking she'd do anything — sacrificing herself being the least of it all — to have her best friend never cry again.

“I’ve been feeling alienated,” Katherine said, as she held one of Trixie’s pillows close to her chest. “By my church."

Before dinner, she had told Trixie the trip was awful and left it at that until she had a glass of wine. Katherine had spoken of her troubles with the church before, but not in so many words. The Church is the only institution in which Katherine ever worried about 'fitting in'. Trixie could not then, as she could not today regardless of what she now knows, fathom why Katherine (or Katya) would ever let anyone tell her she doesn't belong.

“Did something happen on your missionary trip?”

“I’m having doubts," she said. Her voice broke and her shoulders shook.

“Oh, sweetheart, ” Trixie whispered. She took Katherine in her arms, crushing the pillow between them. “You can have doubts.”

“No, I cannot. I can’t. My devotion needs to be unbreakable. If it breaks then I can’t serve the cause.”

Her Boston accent would get so thick when she was upset. Almost comical; an imitation; a caricature. When Trixie gets upset, she sounds ridiculously Midwestern; very bumfuck hick. It’s just the nature of things. Trixie wonders now if her best friend gets very Russian when upset.

“Katherine," Trixie said, as gentle and quiet as a mouse. "Maybe this isn't for you. Maybe this isn’t your cause. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“It’s the only cause. If I’m out, I have nothing. There’s nothing I can give this world.”

“You have yourself. You have your heart. You have the purest heart, Katherine. There’s so much you have to give. But you don’t need to give yourself over to the world. Not for any cause. You being alive, being happy, that is cause enough.”

“That man I told you about. Philip. He’s the perfect Catholic. Dutiful. Quiet. He’ll never have any doubts. He has no reason to. He knows where he fits in, in the church, and out in the world. I’m not that. I’ve never been that. I’m the odd one out. I try my hardest, I give it my all. Whenever I am needed, I go—” she paused to look over at Trixie for a head nod of validation. Trixie though then she knew better than anyone that Katherine was living her life for the goddamn Catholic Church. “But it’s not enough. I don’t know what to do. I need something— a revelation, a—“

“A religious experience?” Trixie offered, after Katherine gave up on her struggle for the right word.

“Yes,” she breathed. Katherine shut her red eyes and laughed. “A sign from God himself. Wouldn’t that be something...”

“It happens,” Trixie said. “Joan of Arc, for one. I'd list off more, but you'll forgive my lack of Christian knowledge.”

Katherine smiled in that one way Trixie to this day doesn't think she’ll ever understand. She wishes to. It’d be her dying wish to understand.

“I know the church sounds like a cult to you,” Katherine said it not accusingly, but resignedly. “But it’s not true. I promise.”

“I’ve never said that, honey. I just worry about you. You’re so stressed after these trips. You should take a break from them, stay home, stay here, stay away from whatever it is you’re seeing over there.”

“I wish more than anything..." she began, then trailed off, shaking her head. “I need some rest.”

“Let’s get you to bed," Trixie said, rubbing Katherine's shoulders.

Katherine sighed. “I need to go home.”

“What?” Trixie said. "No way, you're staying here. It's too late."

“You're too sweet," she said. "But I don’t want to trouble you about this anymore.”

“Katherine...” Trixie said. She pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear and tugged on her lobe. “Don't you know that I’m here for you? You're my dearest friend. I missed you."

"I missed you too."

*

 

The next morning after Jacques', Trixie is wide awake in bed when Shea comes in her room, fresh out of drag and holding two mugs of coffee. 

“How are you holding up, baby?” Shea asks.

Trixie pats the empty spot next to her and rests against Shea's chest once she's on the bed. She accepts the pink mug and takes a long sip.

“It's never-ending," she says, because that's all there is.

Shea rubs her shoulder. “I’m gonna make you something good to eat. I know you haven't been eating well.”

She’d eat well if she was cooking for Katya, making sure she was eating well too. God knows what Katya has been filling her little stomach with. As Trixie knew her, she was never the most healthy woman and was very pleased to buy and devour ice cream, salty treats, sodas, and cigarettes — most of the time, if not always, on the same day.

How her teeth looked so pristine is one of many mysteries surrounding her.

“I haven’t,” Trixie admits. She's been eating the way she did as a teenager: too much (by her mother's standards) and then not enough (by her grandmother's) in a vicious cycle.

Shea kisses her on her forehead and slides off the bed, closes the door behind her and makes a ruckus in the kitchen. Trixie takes a shower. The soaps she's kept for Katya all these years are gathering dust in the cabinet underneath the sink.

After they eat, Trixie washes the dishes with Shea, who doesn't comment on the stacks and stacks of dirty plates and cups and bowls. They work, for the most part, in silence, listening to disco on the radio. Shea turns down the volume during a commercial break.

“Trixie, honey,” Shea starts.

Trixie pauses her scrubbing of an egg-covered dish that's been sitting in the sink for three weeks.

“What happened to you, I've never gone through a thing like that, you know, but lying and betraying is something I know all about. Boyfriends, girlfriends, family. When something really big happens with someone you thought you could trust... Your world crashes down all around you. It's not an exaggeration. It's the truth. Your life was stable ‘cause you had one with that person for so long, then it's gone. But something to take away from this is you can rebuild your life from the ground up to be the way you want. Exactly the way you want. The way you deserve it to be.”

“Yeah,” Trixie says. It is all she can muster. Shea nods and takes the plate away from her, gives it a harder scrub than exhausted muscles can generate.

“You need a good foundation before you start over,” Shea sets aside the plate and wraps her warm, sudsy fingers around Trixie's wrist. “What I’m saying is, take your happy pills, eat better, and get more sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [here's the playlist for those interested.](https://open.spotify.com/user/werewolvse/playlist/38In6CvIoxZ7Hx4LttStr5?si=-fuc9aMjS92zQbvd6152EQ) <3
> 
> if you enjoyed this, consider supporting me on [patreon](https://www.patreon.com/alwrites) where i post previews, deleted scenes, and more. i even post new content (including this chapter update) on there in advance of posting them here!


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